TeleCalm+ Project

The Smoke in the Chimney - An Intelligent TeleCare Solution for Homes
IVF-NSC, Taiwan Joint Research Projects Program
telecalmplus.tmit.bme.hu/
While in recent years much have been done in Europe and all over the world to raise awareness of the challenges that are caused by the ageing population and the sharply increasing number of elderly people. The evolution of information technology and telecommunications, especially the spread of embedded systems and data communications networks opens new possibilities how to deal with this situation. One of the promising application, targeted in this project, is assistive application, among other systems monitoring and helping the elderly, the handicapped and those who need rehabilitation or depend on nursing care. Besides their social importance, assistive applications have great economic significance as well: they create new market opportunities for the economy (cf. ‘silver economy’), and they make it easier to preserve or even improve the quality of life, health and social care services at a sustainable rate of public spending.
The TeleCalmPlus represents a system based on the analogy of “smoke in the chimney”.
In the past family members and relatives were living near each other, and were able to observe the health state of each other on a daily base. The easiest way to do this was to look early in the morning on the chimney of the relatives or family members, checking for smoke. If there was smoke in the chimney, than everything was fine (they started their day in a normal behaviour). If no smoke was observed than something was fishy, and attention was needed. Nowadays families live far away from each other, not being able to check the smoke in the chimney anymore. Our goal is to allow people to do something similarly simple with the help of informatics.
Our system consists of simple devices placed in the users’ home, a server for data storage/evaluation and an Android application for the relatives. The information from the user devices are stored on the server and the data collected can be viewed remotely. Based on the activities and physiological information gathered from the devices, the TeleCalmPlus system gives an overall-evaluation of the users health/daily living condition. The users’ condition represented by state (green, yellow, red) can be viewed remotely on the Android based devices with internet connection. The user can define who to give permission to view his/her everyday activities and physiological condition.
The main advantage of using this system is, that it will signalise continuously if everything is alright. Meaning people don’t need to wonder, why no alarm is coming for a longer time.